Measuring safety performance is a relatively new phenomenon. The 1907 Pittsburgh Survey was an early attempt to assess safety in industry by gathering incident data from one county in Pennsylvania. The study found an alarmingly high fatality rate of nearly two deaths per day over a one-year period. In recent years, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has continued in the tradition of measuring safety through outcome indicators (e.g., recordable injury rates, lost workday rates). OSHA's authority extends to requiring employers to keep records of safety and health data and has strict definitions of how to categorize and tally incidents.
What gets measured, gets done.
Measurement is critical to any process. The purpose of workplace safety and health processes is to reduce and eliminate injuries and illnesses. No professional or organization can know with confidence his or their efforts are being successful at stopping incidents without outcome indicators. The problem with measurement in safety is that we've stopped at counting injuries and illnesses and, in some cases, other non-injury incidents. We have not gone on to track the more difficult process indicators.
For safety professionals, measurement has meant increased attention and clout within organizations. While perhaps not always on a par with other metrics, safety has at least been part of the conversation. Unfortunately, these traditional methods of measuring safety performance focus improvement efforts not on safety processes but on outcome measures. Counting and classifying injuries as a means of measuring safety performance provides inadequate, and frequently inaccurate, information. Because they emphasize outcomes or injuries, traditional measures tend to have a chilling effect on the reporting of incidents. Additionally, outcome measures provide little insight into real safety problems and so hamper development of genuine improvement initiatives. The result is an ineffective management of numbers without real impact on employee safety. Adding process measures provides not only better information for safety improvement but also a means of measuring employee involvement and commitment.
Traditional measures, focusing on outcome numbers including lost time and recordable injury rates, are badly polluted. That is, too many factors outside safety impact these numbers. The previous disciplinary action taken by a supervisor suppresses reporting in his department. The desire of an operator to earn his quarterly incentive prize keeps him from discussing his burn. The burden of having her site hold the corporate record for days without a lost time injury encourages the company nurse to re-evaluate her recommendation. As a result, a mechanic takes a few vacation days rather than seeking medical help for his chronic back pain.
